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Questions For Ryan Gordon, The Linux Game Porter

Phoronix: Questions For Ryan Gordon, The Linux Game Porter

Tomorrow at Chicago's Flourish conference, Ryan Gordon will be speaking about gaming on Linux. This well known Linux developer also known as "Icculus" has single-handedly ported many games and other applications to Linux and Mac OS X. He is certainly well known within the Linux gaming community with the Unreal Tournament titles among his credits. I'll be talking with him tomorrow and here's some of the questions I'll try to get answered...

Do you think it's possible to create high quality open source games? And how?
Do you still like Linux people?
Is the porting business going well?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the desktop, console and mobile platforms?
What about the web as a gaming platform (WebGL)?

What would you change about the development tools, libraries and infrastructure to make Linux attractive to Windows or Mac developers? See Jon Blow's issues from a while back - some basic stuff that seems like it would require changes to very widely used components (SDL, OpenAL, X) to improve. How big an issue are these kinds of things, and how would you go about fixing them?

More generally, what are the biggest issues keeping Linux from being the most solid game development platform out there? How do we go about addressing those issues? Who are the biggest movers in this problem area, ie who do we have to persuade or make demands of?